2014 Holiday Collection #1

To mark the end of the year – as is now traditional on the blog – we asked people across The Futures Company, and former colleagues, to share something they’d found interesting this year. We’ll be publishing the responses on the blog over the holiday period.

Dhatri Navanayagam on children’s books

“There are no good books only for children”: it was with this W. H. Auden quote that began the journey of the New York Public Library’s exhibition, The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter. I particularly enjoyed discovering children’s stories that featured ethnic characters and had been created by authors to serve communities under represented in this literary genre. A highlight was reading a letter written by a librarian from a Hispanic community. She thanked an author for his children’s story, which specifically featured Hispanic characters. It was the first time that the children in her community had encountered a book featuring kids that looked like them.

I will remember 2014 as the year that, after much resistance, I became an adherent of electronic music. New albums from the likes of Todd Terje, Andy Stott, Caribou, SBTRKT, Aphex Twin, and others exposed as regressive my view of music as something that must necessarily be played on analogue instruments by organic humans, rather than produced by digital machines with human engineers and overseers. It was the ironies that hooked me: recorded music that must be heard live in a club; constant change borne of repetition; and perhaps most significantly, digital sounds that evoke a singularly human emotional response.Image via GDE, with thanks.